News and press releases

On 21 September, the OSCE Gender Section, UN Women and UNFPA, the United Nations Population Fund, brought together experts, participating States and civil society to discuss and identify successful approaches to the prevention of violence against women at an event held on 21 September 2017 in Warsaw.

Financial gain is the main incentive for most serious and organized crime networks, and stripping them of their proceeds is the most effective way to dismantle them. Yet according to Europol, only 1.2 per cent of illicit proceeds are confiscated in the European Union, leaving 98.8 per cent at the disposal of criminals. Why is only such a small fragment of crime proceeds confiscated? What can be done to strengthen criminal justice measures to recover illegal assets and disrupt criminal groups? These are the key questions addressed by participants in the 2017 OSCE Annual Police Experts Meeting entitled “Crime Should Not Pay” which started today in the Hofburg in Vienna.

The OSCE Programme Office in Dushanbe organized the first meeting of the sub-working group on mainstreaming gender into police reform under the Ministry of the Interior on 25 September 2017. The meeting took place on the premises of the Interior Ministry and gathered all members of the sub-working group, which includes both civil society organizations from the regions of Tajikistan working on gender issues and representatives from the Interior Ministry and the Committee on Women and Family Affairs.

BERLIN, 25 September 2017 – The 24 September parliamentary elections in Germany were a strong demonstration of the country’s commitment to democratic processes and provided an opportunity for voters to freely express their will, concluded international observers from the OSCE Parliamentary Assembly today following their first-ever election observation mission in the country. The efficiency and professionalism of the election administration, as well as a high level of public confidence in the overall integrity of the electoral process, contributed to the conduct of democratic elections.

An OSCE-supported seminar on the protection of freedom of expression and policies to counter hate speech on the internet took place on 25 September 2017 in Shymkent, Kazakhstan.

VIENNA, 23 September 2017 – “Brutal killing of an American-Syrian journalist and her mother, both reporting about the situation in Syria, highlights the dangers that critical journalists face in their work,” said today OSCE Media Freedom Representative Harlem Désir...

Tashkent, 22 September 2017 – A two-day Sub-regional Conference on the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in regional and international security began today in Tashkent.